Possible associations between callers' degree-of-worry and their socioeconomic status when contacting out-of-hours services: a prospective cohort study.

Background: Telephone triage within out-of-hours (OOH) services aims to ascertain the urgency of a caller's medical condition in order to determine the correct type of health care needed, ensuring patient safety. To improve the triage process by increasing patient-centred communication, a triage tool has been developed, whereby callers are asked to rate their degree-of-worry (DOW) as a measure of self-evaluated urgency. Studies show that low socioeconomic status (SES), being single and non-Western ethnicity are associated to low self-rated health and high morbidity and these factors may also be associated with high DOW.

Relation between illness representation and self-reported degree-of-worry in patients calling out-of-hours services: a mixed-methods study in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Objectives: To examine the relation between patients' illness representations, presented in telephone consultation to out-of-hours (OOH) services, and self-reported degree-of-worry (DOW), as a measure of self-evaluated urgency. If a clear relation is found, incorporating DOW during telephone triage could aid the triage process, potentially increasing patient safety.

Design: A convergent parallel mixed methods design with quantitative data; DOW and qualitative data from recorded telephone consultations.